Google – a company so addicted to AI it's pushing it into places it's simply not wanted – has just lifted the lid on Project Genie, a new Generative AI tool which is able to create playable 'gaming worlds' thanks to the fact that it has been trained (without permission, on the most part) on the billions of hours of footage that has been uploaded by users to YouTube over the decades.
As was discovered when OpenAI released its Sora video creation tool a while back, it's laughably easy to get Project Genie to spit out copyright-infringing footage.
As highlighted by Kotaku, The Verge's Jay Peters – who has been given early access to the tool – has gleefully posted that he was able to "generate a bunch of Nintendo-inspired games. Including one featuring Link with a paraglider!" The footage, as you can clearly see, is so close to Breath of the Wild it's almost funny.
The reaction online has been predictably negative.
Interestingly, Peters notes that there are guardrails present in Project Genie, and he wasn't able to rip off any old video game.
"Project Genie wouldn’t generate a world that I prompted with the scenario of Kingdom Hearts," he explains. "When I removed the specific names of characters and wrote descriptions of them instead, Project Genie generated a thumbnail preview of the world featuring characters that were dead ringers for Sora (the series’ protagonist), Donald, Goofy, Jack Skellington, and Cloud. But when I tried to generate the actual experience, Project Genie blocked me."
He therefore quizzed Google on why the tool was perfectly happy to plagiarise Nintendo's IP without permission but not Disney's, and was told:
"Project Genie is an experimental research prototype designed to follow prompts a user provides. As with all experiments, we are monitoring closely and listening to user feedback."
Peters adds that he was told that the tool is “trained primarily on publicly available data from the web,” which is almost certainly behind one of the big surprises in his Zelda video, as he explains:
"This probably partially explains why Link deployed his paraglider in my test, which surprised me. At a high level, the Genie model is constantly trying to predict the next frame, and I’m sure there are many videos of people jumping in Breath of the Wild and then gliding forward, which the model probably learned from."
Peters also notes that "shortly before publishing this article, Project Genie stopped letting me generate worlds based on Super Mario 64 due to “interests of third-party content providers."
Perhaps Nintendo's legal team is already in touch, but it's nonetheless amazing that a company like Google is prepared to risk a battle of that stature when it launches new products like Project Genie.